Kevin Neeld — Hockey Training, Sports Performance, & Sports Science

This Week in Hockey Strength and Conditioning

This week I posted two new articles related to understanding, assessing for, and training around hip injuries or structural abnormalities that a significant proportion of the hockey population suffers from. My friend Dr. Jeff Cubos wrote a follow-up to Monday’s article for his site. All three have received a ton of great feedback so if you haven’t had a chance to read through them, check them out at the links below:

1) Training Around Femoroacetabular Impingement

2) Hockey Hip Assessment Questions

3) So Your Athlete Has FAI, Now What?

Jeff also added an awesome video series to Hockey Strength and Conditioning. His videos detail a progression to help reinforce single-leg stability and really ingrain requisite dynamic internal rotation control. As I recently mentioned, players that have poor single-leg stability tend to ride their inside edge during the gliding phase of skating. Even if they don’t exhibit this fault, they surely waste power and suffer from a compromised ability to give and withstand contact. This exercise would fit into a program as part of a dynamic warm-up, extra hip mobility/stability work, and/or core training. Check it out at the link below:

Click here to watch >> The Hip Airplane from Dr. Jeff Cubos

Sean Skahan also added a couple videos of sled/sprint contrast work he uses for a phase of the off-season program. Theoretically, contrast work should help maximize recruitment of movement-specific motor units and therefore provide a bigger engine for the secondary exercise that follows the “primer”. Sean’s videos demonstrate one way to apply this concept in a linear movement and lateral movement format, but he alludes to a couple other ways that he uses these during this phase of his program.

Click here to watch >> Sled and Sprint Contrast from Sean Skahan

If you have any questions about these articles or the videos, hop on the Hockey Strength and Conditioning forum and ask. That’s the quickest way to reach me and I know Sean, Darryl, Mike, Jeff Cubos and a couple other really bright guys are pretty active on them as well.

As always, if you aren’t a member yet, I encourage you to try out Hockey Strength and Conditioning for a week. It’ll only cost $1, and if it’s not the best buck you’ve ever spent, I’ll personally refund you!

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld

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Kevin Neeld

Kevin Neeld Knows Hockey

Kevin has rapidly established himself as a leader in the field of physical preparation and sports science for ice hockey. He is currently the Head Performance Coach for the Boston Bruins, where he oversees all aspects of designing and implementing the team’s performance training program, as well as monitoring the players’ performance, workload and recovery. Prior to Boston, Kevin spent 2 years as an Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach for the San Jose Sharks after serving as the Director of Performance at Endeavor Sports Performance in Pitman, NJ. He also spent 5 years as a Strength and Conditioning Coach with USA Hockey’s Women’s Olympic Hockey Team, and has been an invited speaker at conferences hosted by the NHL, NSCA, and USA Hockey.